


where the heart goes

by valety



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Autistic Frisk, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 23:24:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7594474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valety/pseuds/valety
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frisk was surprisingly ready to call Toriel <em>mother.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	where the heart goes

**Author's Note:**

> I headcanon frisk as first nations because I myself am first nations and then I decided to write this because I hate myself I guess
> 
> warnings for depictions of/references to poverty, cultural alienation, racism, internalized self-hatred related to race, child abuse, child neglect, misgendering, and eventual child abandonment

Your real mother and father are strangers to you. You don’t even have a name to place to one, and your mother gave you up long before you were old enough to think to try and memorize her face. They’re ghosts that haunt your dreams, shadows that follow you whenever you’re alone at night, and no matter how many different homes you’re placed in, you can’t escape the way their memory scrapes at you. It lingers, clinging to you like—

Well.

You like to imagine that she had a reason for what she did. Perhaps she’d had a vision of the life you’d lead without her; perhaps she’d had a dream of you as an adult, happy and healthy and with her nowhere in sight. Perhaps she’d truly thought it best for you to grow up without knowing her.

You like to imagine this, and when you do, it becomes a little easier to keep going. You have to keep moving forward, towards the future she had seen for you. Maybe then she won’t have made a mistake. Maybe then you’ll be able to believe somebody loved you.

 

 

Your first home is a house that stands alone, surrounded by evergreens. It’s a house of peeling paint and missing shutters, smoke-stained walls and empty cupboards, but it’s also a house of evenings spent chasing after fireflies while your mother sits on the porch, watching you with a smile and a cigarette.

This mother is actually your aunt, but as you’ve never known another, you call her _mom._ She doesn’t seem to mind, although she looks at you sometimes as though she’s not quite sure where you came from. It’s a look of baffled irritation, a look of _whose child is this?,_ but she always brushes it aside so that she can pull you close and straighten out your sweater or smooth down your hair.

You remember that she always smelled like cigarettes, and whenever she hugged you, your clothes would smell like them too. Even when she had to stay out late, so long as you could smell them, you didn’t feel alone. You remember that she’d bring home crunchy foods for you, carrot sticks and crackers, because you told her that you couldn’t swallow slippery things. You remember that when you’d get excited and flap your hands, she would laugh and flap hers with you, and if anybody asked, you’d have said that you were happy with her.

It’s your fault when things fall apart.

It’s because you turn six years old and need to go to school, but the cupboards are still empty and you have nothing you can bring for lunch. Your teacher, a curly grey woman with large, funny glasses who’d come from somewhere far away, won’t believe you when you say you don’t need food, and the next thing you know, there are phone calls and angry conversations and people in suits poking through your house.

Finally, one takes you by the hand and begins to lead you outside. It occurs to you to struggle, to fight and kick and scream, because clearly they don’t understand that you’re okay. But then you glance back and see your mother watching you with tired eyes, shaking her head.

“You never really belonged here anyway,” she says. “It’s better this way.”

 

 

Your next home is a castle; a huge stone house sitting atop a hill, framed by the forest and the deep blue sky.

At least, that’s the impression that you get when you first arrive, but upon first setting foot inside, you see floors covered in scuffed linoleum and a dimly glowing exit sign. It’s not what you would have expected from a castle, but the man who brings you there makes you a mug of hot chocolate before showing you to your room, and the room itself is comfortable enough for you to decide that it’s okay.

There’s a dresser and a bed and a carpet that feels soft enough for you to lie down right there on the floor, but you don’t: you do as the man suggests and climb onto the mattress instead, where you pull the blankets close around you and fall asleep almost immediately. Sleeping is easier than worrying, and you don’t think that you can do anything else right now.

The blankets feel almost like a hug.

The man who made you hot chocolate is the one who shows you the building, who introduces you to the other children and explains to you what a shower is. Sometimes he brings you back to his office, where he and his funny ties ask friendly, smiley questions about your mother that you can’t answer without going cold. Still, his smile never falters, and so one day after such a meeting, you ask if you can call him _dad._ You’ve never had a dad before, but you think that if you had, he would’ve been like him.

Only then does his smile fade.

 

 

You guess it’s good that you never really grew accustomed to thinking of him as a father, because you have to say goodbye soon enough as it is.

Your next home is a tidy little dollhouse in a tidy little dollhouse neighbourhood. The people who take you in are much the same as the house, tidy and straight and white. They look nothing like you, with your brown skin and black hair and eyes so dark that they seem almost black as well, but their clothes are so neat and their house so large that you guess they’re probably better.

The man is large and booming, the woman small and reedy, and the first time you step into their home, so large, so fully of light, so full of people unlike you, you feel as though you’ve probably made a mistake.

The feeling never goes away, no matter how hard you try.

And you _do,_ you _do_ try _._ You know how to use a shower now, so when they show you to the washroom, you’re sure to scrub yourself all over, trying to scrub away everything that doesn’t belong in the dollhouse. You know how to sit up at the table now, so when it’s time for dinner, you eat everything they give you with a smile on your face, even when it’s slippery and wrong and hard to swallow. When they throw out all your clothes and buy you new ones, you wear the new ones properly, only crying when you’re alone and longing for the familiar scent of your mother’s smoke on wool.

But even though you try and try and try, it’s not enough. You still feel like an alien.

Maybe you can just be invisible, you decide one day. The pressure of this clean white house and your clean white parents feels like the hands of a thousand strangers clawing at you, so maybe you can just withdraw, retreating from the world and deep into yourself so that they won’t notice how badly you’re fitting in.

You stop talking that day. You make yourself as small and unobtrusive as you can, doing your best to fit yourself into whatever corner still has room for you.

It’s almost funny, that a house as large as this still feels so small.

Your mom and dad smile when they see how quiet you’ve become. You hear them talk about “adjusting.” But their smiles fall when you begin to rock, when you begin to twist your hair around your fingers, when you begin to hum, even when you do so privately in your own bedroom.

They tell you to stop, but when you open your mouth to speak, to explain or to apologize, no words rise to the surface. You can’t seem to remember your voice, so you guess it’s your own fault when your mother finally hits you, because she doesn’t understand, because you couldn’t _make_ her understand, because you messed up yet again, stopped being someone who could be loved yet again.

When you start to go to school, you see quickly that there are no other kids like you. The school, too, is a tidy little dollhouse full of tidy little dollhouse people, where everyone is just as neat and clean and white as your new family, and they all look at you with their pale eyes in a way that makes you want to tear your skin off.

You can’t speak in school either. You sit in your desk and rock, trying to ignore their eyes on you, trying to ignore the way they laugh, and that night, you spend hours in the washroom yet again, scrubbing scrubbing scrubbing, but it doesn’t come away, no matter what you do.

Your mother and your father tell you not to rock in school, tell you that you have to speak, tell you to stop tugging at your clothes and picking at your food. Voices rise and hands grab at you so hard they leave a bruise, but the bruises aren’t clean and purple like the bruises you see on other children when they trip and fall; they just make your dark skin darker, make you even dirtier.

You look at your parents sometimes and you no longer see their cleanliness. You see dead skin and sun-bleached bone and the teeth of predators. But even so, you can’t shake the image of yourself as filthy, as someone who doesn’t belong in their tidy little world. Even as the anger starts to bubble up inside you, you can’t shake the feeling that you somehow deserve it, that you’re failing to be the child that they want, the way you’ve always failed before.

When this mother and father eventually give you up as well, you know, even without anybody saying so, that it’s because you weren’t good enough.

 

 

When you return to the group home, it doesn’t feel like a castle anymore, if it ever really did at all.

You have a roommate now; a tall, thin, sullen-looking person with dark circles beneath their eyes and ragged-looking hair. The case worker introduces them as a boy a little older than you, but as soon as he leaves the room, they say, “I’m actually a girl,” and you nod, because you have the same problem sometimes, with people saying you must be one or the other and always getting it wrong.

She doesn’t say anything when you rock on your bed or run your hand up and down the smooth, varnished wood of the dresser, trying to calm the trembling underneath your skin. She doesn’t raise her voice when you can’t talk, just nods in understanding and sits you down one night to show you how to make letters with your hands.

“I used to live in a family with a deaf boy,” she explains, and with your fingers you say _okay,_ and she grins and tousles your hair.

You can’t make yourself disappear completely in the group home. The man with the funny ties needs to speak to you from time to time, calling you into his office to ask you how you’re doing, and the other children stare at you, but you find that it’s almost as good to hide behind somebody else. If you can’t be invisible, then at least you can be overshadowed, and your roommate is tall enough, strong enough, brave enough for her to be the one you hide behind so that you don’t have to confront the ugly things alone.

One day, you find her outside in the yard with a cigarette in her hand. She briefly looks alarmed to see you, but then she laughs and says, “You won’t tell on me, will you, Frisk?”

 _Frisk_ is not your name. She calls you that because you don’t like your name, and because you have trouble staying still when you get happy, but you don’t think you mind. It makes you feel like you could be happy _all_ the time, if you had a name like that.  

You shake your head. With clumsy, stumbling fingers, you ask, _where did you get that?_

“Borrowed it,” she answers.  

 _Borrowed?_ you ask. You don’t know how to sign _you won’t be able to give it back, though,_ but she seems to understand your meaning just the same.  

“It’s okay to borrow things if you really need them,” she explains, flicking away the cigarette butt. “Even if you can’t give them back. Like food. You shouldn’t have to go hungry just because you don’t have money.”

 _That’s smart,_ you say, and she grins.

“I’m pretty smart,” she says, and when you go to sit beside her, she doesn’t push you away, even when your arm brushes against hers.

That night, for the first time in a long, long time, your clothes smell like smoke again, and you dream of a house with peeling paint and missing shutters and all the mothers who have ever said goodbye.

You wonder if maybe you could call her _mom._ Never out loud; to say it out loud would make it real, would give her a chance to back away. You’re not good at making parents love you, but if she never knows that you’ve begun to fill the gap in your heart with her in the first place, then maybe that won’t happen this time.  

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Somebody comes for her eventually, and then you’re all alone, once again with only the lingering memory of smoke to keep you company.

 

 

Every so often there are open houses in which potential parents come to visit.

It’s hard not to get your hopes up, despite everything that’s happened to you since you first went into care.

You think of your birth mother and the vision of the future that you like to think she’d had; a life in which you were safe and happy and beloved. You think of the mother you had afterwards, saying _you never really belonged here anyway_ ; she probably felt the same way, didn’t she? Why _else_ would she have said that it was better this way? She must have known. They _both_ must have known. A better life is coming. It _has_ to be.

But nobody ever chooses you. And for a long, long time, you have no mother or father at all.

 

 

Maybe there are just some things that you’re not meant to have.

But you’re greedy. You want to be able to pretend, even if it isn’t real, even if it has no chance of lasting.

The next time a couple comes to take you home with them, you call them _mom_ and _dad_ as though you’ve never known any others.

When they put you in a room with four walls and a mattress and forget about you, you tell yourself that it has nothing to do with the money that they get for taking care of someone with “extra needs”.

And when they eventually leave you on Mt. Ebott, you tell yourself that it was just an accident, that they really must be worried, that they will definitely want you back.  

You know that you have to go home, wherever _home_ may be. You can’t just stay there at the bottom of a pit and wait to die, no matter how soft those flowers feel, no matter how the memory of a pair of arms that let you go still twists your heart.

Even if it can’t be real—even if you don’t deserve it—you want to still pretend that somebody out there loves you.

 

 

Maybe you should…

But no.

It doesn’t matter.

 

 

It’s not your voice that says “Mom Lady…?” when Toriel picks up the phone. It’s not your voice because you don’t _have_ a voice, and you already have a mom, a mom who will be worried, and you have a dad as well, but…still. It feels right, somehow. It feels natural, as though something has once again been clicked into place after having been jarred loose one too many times.

“Would that make you happy?” Toriel asks. “To call me…‘Mother?’”

The voice has once again gone silent, and your own voice has dried up completely. But somehow, you manage to choke out a single _uh huh_ in affirmation.

She is quiet for a moment.

Then, sounding almost happy, she says, “Well then, call me whatever you like!”

 

 

Can you really? Can you really do that? Is it really okay?

But you don’t belong here, either, do you?

…you have to go home. They’re waiting for you there.

 

 

Toriel’s house is not the same as the dollhouse you had lived in once before, but it still feels too much like a soft, storybook world to possibly be a place where you can stay. Clearly this is someone else’s life you’ve stumbled into; Toriel can’t possibly have room for you as well, not when the toys in the bedroom she has shown you have clearly been well-loved, not when the dressers are all full of someone else’s clothes.

 _I have to go,_ you tell yourself over and over again, lest you forget and grow too comfortable. You have parents who chose you, even if they later forgot about you as well. You have a family already, almost. You can’t stay, not even if the voice in your head is urging you to do so, not even if Toriel is asking you to stay and read _72 Uses for Snails_ with her.  

You want to ask her how to exit the ruins. But she’s looking at you with an expectant smile on her face, and finally, you nod, and climb onto her lap.

You rest your head against her shoulder, and in that serene voice that envelops you like warm satin, Toriel says, “Here is an exciting snail fact. Did you know that snails sometimes flip their digestive systems as they mature?”

You shake your head. You didn’t know that.

You press your head even more firmly against her shoulder, breathing in the smell of smoke and magic fire, and you try and tell yourself that you are home. And for a moment, with the weight of her arms around you and the shadow of another’s soul clinging to your somehow still-beating heart, you can almost make yourself believe it.


End file.
